While most people appreciate the importance of physical fitness, many have difficulty finding the motivation required to maintain a regular exercise program. Some people find it particularly difficult to maintain an exercise regimen that involves continuously repetitive motions, such as running, walking and bicycling. Additionally, individuals may view exercise as work or a chore and thus, separate it from enjoyable aspects of their daily lives. Often, this clear separation between athletic activity and other activities reduces the amount of motivation that an individual might have toward exercising. Further, athletic activity services and systems directed toward encouraging individuals to engage in athletic activities might also be too focused on one or more particular activities while an individual's interest are ignored. This may further decrease a user's interest in participating in athletic activities or using the athletic activity services and systems.
With regard to professional and/or serious amateur athletes (e.g. pro-am athletes), many existing services and devices fail to provide accurate assessment of one or more metrics, such as their performance, performance load, reaction, fatigue, among others. Existing devices for flight time monitoring one or more metrics often suffer from one or more deficiencies, including: cumbersome collection systems, inaccurate measurements that are beyond an acceptable threshold, unacceptable latency in reporting the values, erroneous classification of activities based upon detected motions of the user, failure to account for deviations between different users, inapplicability of the collected or processed data to measure performance or other metrics, relatively high power consumption, and/or a combination of these or other deficiencies.
Specific to airtime, prior attempts attempting to incorporate airtime as a metric merely focused on flight of one or both feet in the context of jumps. For example, with reference to basketball players, prior attempts may have considered an offensive player making a jump shot or a defensive player attempting to jump up to block the shot of the offensive player to determine flight time. As would therefore be expected, such results would be highly correlated to total jumps during the same time period.
Currently, flight time, such as during a jump, may be measured or captured using various methodologies including video/motion capture, jump test mats, and force plates. However, these methods require specialized equipment and/or installations in a stationary position in the desired sport venue or environment. Further, these methods are expensive, often unable to differentiate one athlete from another, and/or require additional processing steps or materials to obtain individualized measurements in a time-efficient and user-friendly manner.
Certain methodologies for obtaining athletic measurements require attaching sensor units or inertial measurement units (IMU) containing sensors, such as accelerometers and gyroscopes, directly on the body or clothing of an athlete. However, in sport activities such as basketball or soccer, such accessory devices are prohibited by regulatory organizations due to risk of injury and other factors.